I wish omitting alt text was the equivalent of empty alt text.

Nothing else works this way. If a page doesn't have a favicon, you don't add an empty icon href.

I know empty alt text is preferred because otherwise, screen readers will usually revert to reading the file name. I wish screen readers didn't do that.

I always thought it was standardized that way in an effort to get people to care about accessibility.

But FWIK it might just be because someone on the standards committee wanted it that way.

Does that work though? If you don't care about accessibility, you can still leave out the tags. Screen readers will then default to reading the file name, which I'd argue is worse than skipping over images in the general case.

It probably worked better when everyone validated their pages and (I think) html quality used to be a ranking factor in Google.

> If a page doesn't have a favicon, you don't add an empty icon href.

You can though — it prevents a 404 error being logged in the browser console.

e.g. <link rel="icon" href="data:,">